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But ok, I've got a completely unrelated technical question that's been bothering me for a while that I might as well submit to the ObWi readership. I use Bloglines as my RSS reader and every morning I wake up to about 400 new items... a good quarter of which usually turn out to be old articles from Slate and the Washington Post (these are the worst offenders, but there are others), who seem determined to republish every single thing from the past month or more in their feeds, often several times a day, just in case I didn't catch it the first dozen times. Does anyone else have this problem, and is there anyway to stop these articles from constantly returning to my RSS inbox?

You might want to try some of the new newsreaders out there. My current fave is Shrook, followed closely by Netnewswire. Both are pay, but you save your subs and data on their server and can then read anywhere you can hook up to the interwubs. Another option, if you want a webbased reader is the Google reader, which works well. It shouldn't be too difficult to give new ones a try if you simply export your subscription list as OPML.

Yeah, I thought about trying a different reader but wasn't sure if this problem was likely to be tied to that, or to the feeds themselves. I suppose I might surrender a little more of my life to Google and see if there's an improvement. Thanks for the tip!

I am still here, but not for too much longer — contract ends in July, then I spend six weeks traveling home by way of Xinjiang, Vietnam, Cambodia, Zambia, and London. Then I get back to the States and remember that I no longer have a job, house, or the adoration of legions of small Japanese children, and wonder what I was thinking leaving in the first place. If anyone's got any think tanks in D.C. they think highly of that might be hiring entry-level research-assistant type positions for recent international relations grads, I'm cranking out the applications now...